


A Pact; A Proposal

by scroogesnephew



Category: Company - Sondheim/Furth
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2020-10-11 14:42:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20547851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scroogesnephew/pseuds/scroogesnephew
Summary: An (angsty) look inside Bobby’s head during the proposal.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Someday I will stop obsessing over these minor characters. It is not this day.

8 years was a long time. A long time to date one person, and an eternity when you’re staving off marriage with one hand the same way a rock holds out against a rushing tide. It erodes.

Amy had been dating Paul for a damn long time.

But she’d been friends with Bobby longer.

Sure, Amy and Bobby had referenced the pact before, in front of Paul, even. Laughingly, knowing the pact must lay dead, like a cut fragment of electric wire in a puddle. No need for it. Amy had Paul. Bobby had bachelorhood. The pact fell underneath a pile of clutter, the stuff of a life, phones ringing and concerts to attend and bills stacked on tables. They forgot it. An old college joke. 

Now Bobby looked at Amy, trembling in her white dress, and the pact suckerpunched him.

“Amy,” he said, to himself, almost more than her. She didn’t hear. For once she stood stock still, thrown flat out of her usual orbit of panicked chaos. With her eyes closed, slowly unclenching her fists and laying them against her thighs, she could have passed for stoic. Noble. Sure of herself, even.

“Amy,” his voice broke, and now she heard. Her blue eyes opened, but didn’t leave the high tower of the church cathedral, just viewable out their window.

“Marry me,” said Bobby.

“What?”

“Marry me.”

His mind hadn’t even finished the thought when his mouth did it for him. There’s Amy, there’s your best friend, there’s the woman you should marry. Maybe it was always supposed to be Amy, maybe that’s why you see her everywhere you look, maybe that’s why she couldn’t marry Paul after all this time, maybe that’s why she’s so afraid, maybe she loves you the most, maybe you’re always supposed to marry your best friend anyway, maybe that’s all marriage is, an arbitrary friendship made permanent, and ours already is -

A half-manic, half-mad laugh interrupted him. “Wha-“

“Think about it, Amy, please,” and against his will his voice became pleading; he grabbed both her hands in his own and cried “Marry me! And then...everyone will leave us alone!”

He said what he’d thought she was asking to hear. For perhaps the first time in their friendship, he’d truly misunderstood Amy.

She picked up her bouquet of jonquils from the table where she’d discarded them, gingerly picking through their wilting petals. She smiled up at him, eyes shining.

“Thank you, Bobby, I’m really - “ she cut herself off then, and Bobby could have died, would have happily, only to know what lay at the other end of that sentence, but she began a new one: “It’s just...you have to want to marry somebody. Not just some...body.”

And for the first time in their friendship, Amy had truly misunderstood Bobby.

She muttered something, unceremoniously handed her flowers off to Bobby, something about Paul catching pneumonia in the rain, her voice flying up an octave back to its usual neurotic pitch, dashed for the door and at the last moment turned back to face Bobby, head on. “I’m getting married. And he’s so good, isn’t he?”

The world stood still.

“He’s so good,” she finished and nodded, more to herself than him, picking up an umbrella and turning for the door again. Bobby’s arm moved without his telling it to, and his mouth followed. “Amy,” he said, and threw her the bouquet.

She laughed, almost maniacally then, and he knew it was over. “I’m the next bride!” Amy flew out the door into the flooding rain.

Bobby sat back down at the table. Drained what was left of his orange juice. He was still Paul’s best man. He was still Amy’s best friend.

The wedding was still on. And Bobby had to go.


	2. “So who does she marry?” “Neither of them.”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It isn’t the right ending. She said the whole book that she doesn’t want to marry anyone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A surprise quasi-sequel to the first chapter. A better ending for Amy, I think. Or rather, a new beginning.

When Bobby proposed - wholeheartedly, in his throat - Amy exhaled ten years of wondering. Ten years of trying to explain to family and friends what they were, how they felt about each other, how Paul felt about it all. Of knowing she’d eventually have to toss one man over for the other. Somehow the grandest expression of love one can make - marriage - in reality requires a narrowing of love, a reduction, a repression. In Amy’s case, a halving, from two down to one.

And there stood Bobby, on Amy’s wedding day, with his hands in hers. Bobby, with his best man speech crumpled up in one pocket, and his man of honor speech (folded and refolded until the creases softened) in the other.

Amy picked up the bouquet. Jonquils and hydrangeas. A hideous combination of her two favorite flowers.

She pressed them into Bobby’s hands. Then snagged an umbrella and bolted out into the rain, heart flying, hoping beyond hope to catch Paul before he entered the synagogue just across the street -

And then she saw him. Sitting on a bench across the road, doused in the pouring rain. He was just...letting the water hit him. His tux would be ruined. His curly hair was pasted to his forehead. He buried his face in both hands, with his elbows on his knees.

Amy felt some familiar, nauseous combination of protectiveness and revulsion. Paul looked for all the world like a toddler, crying in time-out.

She moved robotically toward the crosswalk. One foot in front of the other. Muscle memory. He’s good. He’s so good. Her pulse echoed with half-baked justifications. Reasons to get married. To follow through, after ten years of holding off.

Still, she knew choosing Paul was accepting a kind of defeat. Surrendering at last to let herself be loved and doted upon in the way she’d never learned to do for herself.

Now, she would never need to learn. Self-love would be a moot point with Paul always around.

The light changed. The sign shouted at Amy to cross the road. Make the decision. The Hobson’s choice. Marry Paul or be alone forever. You’ve already walked out on Bobby. There’s only one person left who loves you. Only one person who ever could.

She looked at Paul. He hadn’t seen her yet. He was just across the street. To her left was an alleyway leading in the other direction, down which people were disappearing every second, a glimmering stream of gold and blue and red.

The light blinked. Five seconds to cross the road. Now four. Three. Two.

And for once, Amy didn’t surrender.

She flew into the alleyway and mingled in among the crowd, lost instantly among heads taller than her own, not knowing where she was headed, not caring. Away from the apartment - goodbye books, goodbye paintings, goodbye houseplants, goodbye cat - away from the synagogue and Paul and Bobby and everyone. Away from the buildings she recognized, where Jenny and David lived, Sarah and Harry, Susan and Peter, Larry and Joanne, all of them with their balcony railings like hungry rows of teeth waiting to eat her up.

Amy, in her wedding dress, on the metro. She asked to borrow a stranger’s pocketknife, and with a loud ripping noise, cut off the bottom half of her dress. She wound the piece around her palm so she could tie it in a knot. On the seventh or eighth stop, she got off and discarded the knot in a trash can. She thanked God she’d worn flats.

She knew where she was.

She felt a pang thinking of Paul and Bobby, alone together, lost without her. One pang.

Then her throat tightened. Her eyes dried. She knew where she was headed.

She started walking.


End file.
